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Unified Challenge 16.2

Monday, July 25, 2016

What is it?

Unified Challenge is the U.S. Army’s experimentation program that explores the concepts and capabilities the Army needs to meet future challenges. This campaign, led by the Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Army Capabilities Integration Center Concept Development and Learning Directorate, is a continuing effort to examine the requirements needed to build an agile and adaptive future Army of 2030. This program supports the 39th chief of staff of the Army’s second priority, the future Army.

Unified Challenge 16.2, conducted July 31 through Aug. 12, is an Army-level experiment that will look for new ways to organize and operate in the years 2025 through 2030. Commanders and staffs from across the Army, along with sister services, U.S. government and multinational partners will explore these new ways in a future realistic and complex scenario. After rigorous analysis, the results of this event will lead to recommendations for consideration by senior Army leaders.

What has the Army done?

The Army established Force 2025 Maneuvers, a comprehensive approach to develop the future Army that incorporates multiple learning events such as Unified Quest, How the Army Fights, Network Integration Evaluation, Army Warfighting Assessment and Unified Challenge. At the end of each learning event, concept developers, assisted by analysts, update concepts to inform the next event.

Force 2025 Maneuvers uses important insights from major Army exercises and lessons learned from past and ongoing operations to help build the future Army.

What continued efforts are planned for the future?

ARCIC briefs the Army chief of staff at the conclusion of the 2016 Campaign of Learning on the results of experimentation. In 2017, Unified Challenge will continue exploring future concepts and capabilities with two more experiments, UC 17.1 and UC 17.2. These events will further build on the initial results learned in 2016, with the multiyear campaign concluding in 2018.

Why is this important to the Army?

The UC 16.2 game-based experiment allows the Army to:

  • Think clearly about future armed conflict and develop a sound conceptual foundation for Army modernization.
  • Learn about future armed conflict in a focused, sustained and collaborative manner to identify capability gaps and opportunities to achieve overmatch.
  • Analyze results to prioritize solutions to ensure that the Army has the capability and capacity to accomplish future missions.
  • Implement solutions to increase the rate of innovation and maintain the Army’s differential advantage over capable and determined enemies.

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